Raspberry Pi’s Upton warns AI hype could deter UK tech talent pipeline

TL;DR:

• Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton told the BBC’s Big Boss Interview podcast that overestimating AI’s capabilities could “distort people’s choices in ways that make [the UK’s] skill shortage worse and not better”.
• Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have all attributed tens of thousands of layoffs in the past year to AI, but Upton — and some labour-market commentators — caution that AI is being used as cover for post-Covid hiring corrections.
• Upton also flagged UK energy costs (among the G7’s highest) as the single biggest reason he would not site engineering-build manufacturing in the UK, with knock-on effects on wages and labour cost.

Upton’s argument is that the policy conversation around AI and the workforce is happening on a thin data base. Asked what guidance parents should give children choosing GCSEs in an “AI future”, he replied: “We have no data to inform a rational decision on that. The answer is: wait five years, wait 10 years, and then maybe we might know something.” That is a deliberately unflattering counterpoint to the more confident projections coming out of frontier-lab and consulting forecasts.

Why the warning matters now

Raspberry Pi has spent over a decade trying to widen UK access to programming hardware — Upton founded the company in 2012 because mobile phones and games consoles had eclipsed programmable devices in young people’s hands. His worry is reputational: if school-leavers internalise the message that AI will eliminate tech jobs, the UK’s already-thin engineering pipeline thins further. “We need a supply of engineers,” he said when asked whether the phenomenon could damage growth. “Absolutely.”

UK angle: the energy-cost subplot

The interview also surfaced the structural drag of UK energy costs — Upton said: “About the only reason I wouldn’t do engineering build objects in the UK is the high cost of energy, and we need to do something about that.” That observation sits alongside the AI-jobs argument because UK industrial AI deployment (data centres, edge inference, robotics, electronics manufacture) has the same energy-cost exposure. For UK SMEs in tech manufacture, the labour-cost-energy-cost loop he describes is a live constraint, not a hypothetical.

Looking forward

Raspberry Pi’s London Stock Exchange listing in 2024 has been a rare UK-listing success story, and Upton’s voice carries weight in policy circles. The next data points are GCSE and A-level subject choices for the 2026-27 cohort, and any DfE or DSIT response on STEM intake. If the AI-hype-deters-engineering thesis holds, the warning lights will show up first in computing GCSE entries, computer science A-level entries, and engineering undergraduate applications.